Travels with a Thin Skin
From New York to Paris, Greece, India, last stop the French Alps
by
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The war years 1943-1946: on board the MV Rescue
The war years were strange years for me. Shortly after returning to New York City, I managed to ship out as an Ordinary Seaman with the MV Rescue, a converted tug considered too unsafe to be manned by the regular Navy. By this time I was getting used to living with people who earned their living with strength, courage, endurance and some resignation. But it still wasn't easy for me as a city boy.
Being smart, even being learned, can be a dangerous thing when you are with American workers That is because you are both feared and resented. On board ship, you have to be careful. If you are hanging over the side of the ship, especially at sea, seated on a small board, the man on deck is responsible for seeing that your line is well secured and he had better be a friend of yours.
I had never intended to be a sailor, and might have never become one but for the fact that the man standing behind me on the line at the employment office, headed me in that direction. A small man, wiry but intense and very friendly had asked me what kind of work I was looking for. I replied that as long as the work was outdoors it made no difference.
"Why don't you go to sea?"
" Because I don't know anything about it, and have no experience”.
“This is wartime. Stick with me and by this afternoon you will be a sailor!”
. By five that afternoon I had become a sailor on deck for the Moran Towing and Shipping Corporation and the vessel was the MV Rescue.
The ship, when I saw it, was small. It had been built as an armed tug but the U.S. Navy found it too unsafe to be manned by their crews in the ‘regular navy’ and turned it over to private hands. And one of those private hands was now mine.
By next morning. I helped cast off the lines and we sailed out of New York harbour bound south. And the cookies they bake had first been fried in pork fat.
Looking back on my first cruise at sea I can remember all the good parts more easily than the bad ones. I learned to be a seaman and became fairly good at stowing lines, painting and chipping the iron, casting off and making fast on deck.
By next morning I had helped cast off the lines that moored us to East 23rd St. and was sailing out of NY harbor, bound south. Most of the men in the crew were southerners so we had cold pork chops for snacks at coffee time. And whatever cookies they baked had first been fried
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About the Book
"Nedd Willard's engaging adventure of discovery describes his inner travels from his early boyhood in New York to the outer reaches of a wider world. His "on the road" travels eventually lead him back to one of his first and most enduring loves, the sea, his gateway to a world of unknowns and expectations-some realized and some not."
Schlein
About the Author
Some people are born restless and a lust to see whatever is over the horizon. I am one of those. Since adolescence I always had a pen, a brush and a bottle of India ink in my pocket. Born in New York City I wandered as a child to the end of the tramline and began walking. At sixteen I was given a scholarship at the University of Wisconsin. After one year, wandered and hitchhiked West all the way to Montana with no real destination. Back in NY, I was recruited as a seaman on a merchant ship called the MV Rescue and later joined the US Navy.
After the war I finished my studies and sailed for fun and money. Encountering Europe in Antwerp I decided to return some day. I did, teaching English in rural southeast France one year and then off again to Greece, having first walked in Mt. Athos on foot, a peninsula peopled with Greek and Russian monasteries where all females, including animals, have been forbidden access for at least a thousand years.
In Columbia University I earned a Master’s Degree in eighteenth century literature. Later in Paris got my doctorate while doing odd jobs that included teaching English in rural France for a year. With a sailor’s sea bag on my back went to Marseilles to join a French volunteer brigades to help reconstruct Tito’s Yugoslavia Tito. Later I headed south walked over the frontier to Greece and became a sailor on an American vessel going to the States.
Teaching French at the University of New Hampshire and t Columbia University, where I was offered the position as Secretary-General of the Alliance Francaise in the U.S. It allowed me to travel the United States to liven up local activities.
Returning to the French Alps, I bought a house and began working as an interpreter in English, French and Spanish at the UN that took me to the Cameroons and Nigeria. In Ethiopia I was offered a job in Geneva at UN headquarters. Later chance made me a public information specialist for WHO.